Wikipedia Controversy

Two journalists accused Arkansas officials in a lawsuit Friday of violating the state's Freedom of Information Act by withholding information about which government computers were to used to edit entries on the Wikipedia Web site. Arkansas News Editor Kelly P. Kissel and writer Jon Gambrell filed the lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court against Gov. Mike Beebe, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel...

In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane. To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable — and relatively small — price to pay for the dazzling breadth...

On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be the “1029th...

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera. Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be...

Encyclopaedia Britannica has reopened the debate over how its accuracy stacks up against that of its online rival, Wikipedia. The publisher of the venerable encyclopedia this week released a scathing 20-page rebuttal to a December article in the journal Nature that tallied errors in both Britannica and Wikipedia and found that the web upstart more than held its own. The experts who reviewed...

It's not easy being Wikipedia, a free web encyclopedia created and edited by anonymous contributors. Just ask founder Jimmy Wales, who has seen his creation come under fire in just a few short months as the site fends off vandalism and charges of inaccurate entries. “Wikipedia has always been in a state of change,” says Wales, in defense of his product. That’s putting it mildly. On November 29...

With the dread of potential research papers hanging over the heads of many students this early in a semester, many could face a potential problem with an online source that is readily accessible, easy to understand and could contain personal editorials over the prospective subject to be researched. After developing the concept or tentative subject for collecting research, the first thing most...

Last fall, students at the University of South Florida contributed to Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, by writing entries for numpty, mohoger, japsoc, and gavilan. The definitions they gave were foggy (numpty, "tea from the land of nump"; gavilan, "a species of left-wing American focused solely on doom and gloom"). Their English professor, Alex Duensing, encouraged them to dream up more...

THE debate over Wikipedia has hit a fever pitch in recent weeks. Supporters of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, are pitted against traditionalists who call the site inaccurate and irresponsible. The latest salvo came this week thanks to Rogers Cadenhead, who did a bit of cybersleuthing and reported on Workbench that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, had altered his own...

The recent uproar over a fake Wikipedia entry on journalist John Siegenthaler, Sr. should teach us all an important lesson: If you get the itch to libel someone, try to avoid prominent journalists from powerful families -- especially when they have carte blanche to use the USA Today editorial page to hunt you down. Siegenthaler -- scion of a prominent Nashville family, one-time RFK aide, editor...